I've had Google Adsense advertising for quite a while on my blog,
the g4u homepage and various other pages.
In the start a little bit of money came in.
This has all dried up long since, and in light of
privacy regulations like the EU GDPR I've decided to
not give away my users' data to Google any longer.
So, there it is - my blog and other pages are free for your use now,
and you are no longer the product being sold. Enjoy! :-)

New year, new security advisories!
So things have become a bit silent here, which is due
to reallife - my apologies. Still, I'd like to wish
everyone following this here a Happy New Year 2018!
And with this, a few new security advisories have
been published:

34C3 talk: Are all BSDs created equally?
I haven't seen this mentioned on the NetBSD mailing lists,
and this may be of interest to some -
there was a talk about security bugs in the various BSDs at the 34th Chaos
Communication Congress:

In summary, many reasons for bugs are shown in many areas of the kernel
(system calls, file systems, network stack, compat layer, ...), and what has
happened after they were made known to the projects.

As a hint, NetBSD still has a number of Security Advisories to publish, it
seems. Anyone wants to help out the security team? :-)

g4u 2.6 released
After a five-year period for beta-testing and updating,
I have finally released g4u 2.6. With its origins in 1999,
I'd like to say: Happy 18th Birthday, g4u!

About g4u:
g4u ("ghosting for unix") is a NetBSD-based bootfloppy/CD-ROM that allows easy cloning of PC harddisks to deploy a common setup on a number of PCs using FTP. The floppy/CD offers two functions. The first is to upload the compressed image of a local harddisk to a FTP server, the other is to restore that image via FTP, uncompress it and write it back to disk. Network configuration is fetched via DHCP. As the harddisk is processed as an image, any filesystem and operating system can be deployed using g4u. Easy cloning of local disks as well as partitions is also supported.

The past:
When I started g4u, I had the task to install a number
of lab machines with a dual-boot of Windows NT and NetBSD.
The hype was about Microsoft's "Zero Administration Kit" (ZAK)
then, but that did barely work for the Windows part - file transfers were
slow, depended on the clients' hardware a lot (requiring fiddling with MS
DOS network driver disks), and on the ZAK server the files for
installing happened do disappear for no good reason every now and then.
Not working well, and leaving out NetBSD (and everything elase),
I created g4u. This gave me the (relative) pain of getting
things working once, but with the option to easily add network
drivers as they appeared in NetBSD (and oh they did!), plus allowed
me to install any operating system.

The present:
We've used g4u successfully in our labs then, booting from CDROM.
I also got many donations from public and private instituations
plus comanies from many sectors, indicating that g4u does make a
difference.

In the mean time, the world has changed, and CDROMs aren't used
that much any more. Network boot and USB sticks are today's devices
of choice, cloning of a full disk without knowing its structure
has both advantages but also disadvantages, and g4u's user interface
is still command-line based with not much space for automation.
For storage, FTP servers are nice and fast, but alternatives
like SSH/SFTP, NFS, iSCSI and SMB for remote storage plus local storage
(back to fun with filesystems, anyone? avoiding this was why g4u
was created in the first place!) should be considered these days.
Further aspects include integrity (checksums), confidentiality
(encryption).
This leaves a number of open points to address either by
future releases, or by other products.

The future:
At this point, my time budget for g4u is very limited.
I welcome people to contribute to g4u - g4u is Open Source
for a reason. Feel free to get back to me for any changes
that you want to contribute!

The changes:
Major changes in g4u 2.6 include:

Make this build with NetBSD-current sources as of 2017-04-17 (shortly before netbsd-8 release branch), binaries were cross-compiled from Mac OS X 10.10

Many new drivers, bugfixes and improvements from NetBSD-current (see beta1 and beta2 announcements)

Go back to keeping the disk image inside the kernel as ramdisk, do not load it as separate module. Less error prone, and allows to boot the g4u (NetBSD) kernel from a single file e.g. via PXE (Testing and documentation updates welcome!)

Actually DO provide the g4u (NetBSD) kernel with the embedded g4u disk image from now on, as separate file, g4u-kernel.gz

Native Command Queuing - merging and testing
Jaromir Dolecek has worked on NCQ and is looking for
testers in context of merging the development branch
into NetBSD-current.

What is NCQ? According to
Wikipedia,
``Native Command Queuing (NCQ) is an extension of the Serial ATA protocol allowing hard disk drives to internally optimize the order in which received read and write commands are executed. This can reduce the amount of unnecessary drive head movement, resulting in increased performance (and slightly decreased wear of the drive) for workloads where multiple simultaneous read/write requests are outstanding, most often occurring in server-type applications.''

Jaromir
writes to tech-kern:
``I plan to merge the branch to HEAD very soon, likely over the weekend. Eventual further fixes will be done on HEAD already, including mvsata(4) restabilization, and potential switch of siisata(4) to support NCQ.

The plan is to get this pulled up to netbsd-8 branch soon also, so that it will be part of 8.0.

Status:

ahci(4) fully working with NCQ (confirmed with qemu, and real hw)

piixide(4) continues working (no NCQ support of course) (confirmed in qemu)

Support for Controller Area Networks (CAN) in NetBSD
Manuel Bouyer has worked on NetBSD CAN-support, and now he
writes:
``I'd like to merge the bouyer-socketcan branch to HEAD in the next few
days (hopefully early next week, or maybe sunday), unless someone objects
to the idea of a socketcan implementation in NetBSD.

CAN stands for Controller Area Network, a broadcast network used
in automation and automotive fields. For example, the NMEA2000 standard
developped for marine devices uses a CAN network as the link layer.

This adds a new socket family (AF_CAN) and protocol (PF_CAN),
as well as the canconfig(8) utility, used to set timing parameter of
CAN hardware. The branch also includes a driver for the CAN controller
found in the allwinner A20 SoC (I tested it with an Olimex lime2 board,
connected with PIC18-based CAN devices).

There is also the canloop(4) pseudo-device, which allows to use
the socketcan API without CAN hardware.

At this time the CANFD part of the linux socketcan API is not implemented.
Error frames are not implemented either. But I could get the cansend and
canreceive utilities from the canutils package to build and run with minimal
changes. tcpdump(8) can also be used to record frames, which can be
decoded with etherreal.

A review of the code in src/sys/netcan/ is welcome, especially for possible
locking issues.''

Announcing NetBSD and the Google Summer of Code Projects 2017
The NetBSD Project posts that
we are very happy to announce that the selection process in this year's
Summer of Code with its bargaining of slots and what student gets assigned
to which project is over. As a result, the following students will take on
their projects:

Leonardo Taccari will work add multi-packages support to pkgsrc.

Maya Rashish will work on the LFS cleanup.

Utkarsh Anand will make Anita support multiple virtual machine systems
and more architectures within them to improve testing coverage.

What follows now is a community bonding period until May 30th, followed by a
coding period over the summer (it's Summer of Code, after all :-)
until August 21st, evaluations, code submission and an announcement of the
results on September 6th 2017.

Good luck to all our students and their mentors - we look forward to your
work results, and welcome you to The NetBSD Project!

This first article in a blog series starts by
describing regular and oven ontrolled crystal oscillators,
then goes on in describing the hardware setup and how it is
connected to a computer. In this case, a Banana Pi running
NetBSD/evbarm is used which (of course) also has its own
clock. Oscilloscope measurements show differences in
quality of signals and why an adapter is needed to adjust
the system's clock frequency (including changes to the
NetBSD kernel).

g4u 2.6beta2 has been released - Happy 18th Birthday, g4u!
Just right in time for its 18th birthday, I have released
the 2nd beta version for g4u 2.6 (2.6beta2).
It took some time to get to this point, and I want to move
to 2.6 soon - please take your time to test and get back to me
soon, as I want to push out g4u version 2.6 in june 2017.

g4u ("ghosting for unix") is a NetBSD-based bootfloppy/CD-ROM that allows easy cloning of PC harddisks to deploy a common setup on a number of PCs using FTP. The floppy/CD offers two functions. The first is to upload the compressed image of a local harddisk to a FTP server, the other is to restore that image via FTP, uncompress it and write it back to disk. Network configuration is fetched via DHCP. As the harddisk is processed as an image, any filesystem and operating system can be deployed using g4u. Easy cloning of local disks as well as partitions is also supported.

Make this build with NetBSD-current sources as of 2017-04-17,
binaries were cross-compiled from Mac OS X 10.10

Go back to keeping the disk image inside the kernel as ramdisk,
do not load it as separate module. Less error prone, and allows
to boot the g4u (NetBSD) kernel from a single file e.g. via PXE
(Testing and documentation updates welcome!)

Actually DO provide the g4u (NetBSD) kernel with the embedded g4u disk
image from now on, as separate file, g4u-kernel.gz

Put all object files into one object directory. This may need more cleanup
in the future. Feedback from people building g4u welcome!